Sustainability in the Global City: Myth and Practice

New Directions in Sustainability and Society

by Cindy Isenhour (Editor), Melissa Checker (Editor), Gary W. McDonogh (Editor)

Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life – particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.

426 pages, Hardcover

First published December 13, 2014

About the author

Dr. Cindy Isenhour is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maine, USA.

"As an ecological and economic anthropologist I am particularly interested in environmental risk perception, economic decision-making and cooperation for environmental governance. Much of my recent work has focused on policies, institutions and everyday practices designed to encourage more “sustainable consumption” in highly affluent urban contexts. This work builds on a growing international recognition that successful and just governance of the global commons will require significant reductions in resource use and emissions in the so-called “developed” world. Drawing on work in institutional and ecological economics my work compliments anthropological insights into ecological cooperation, institution building and adaptation in rural and subsistence-based economies with research on urban sustainability policy and practice. I have conducted field work in the US, Central America, China, and Scandinavia and am currently working on a new project designed to explore the policy and environmental justice implications of consumption-based emissions accounting for Chinese producers and Swedish consumers."